Contestants for a Miss World beauty pageant, pose for the cameras. While the beauty world is often accused of homogeny of looks, new research shows what is considered attractive in a face varies widely.
Photograph: Toby Melville/PA

If your partner has a face that could curdle milk, you only have yourself to blame. Scientists have found that the faces we fancy are shaped more by our personal experiences than genetics or other influences.

Their study into facial attraction showed that when it came to rating people as hot or not, even identical twins who grew up together disagreed. In fact, genetics turned out to explain only a fifth of the variation in people’s tastes, meaning very little was inherited.

The greatest influence on people’s preferences was their own life experiences - a mass of factors that could include the friends they make, the odd chance encounter, and even the face of their first love.

“If you think about your first romantic relationship, that person’s face, or someone who looks like them, might be attractive to you for years to come,” said Laura Germine, a psychologist who co-led the study at Massachusetts general hospital in Boston.

“On the one hand, it’s common sense that our individual experiences will be important for who we find attractive, but on the other hand, we know that people’s ability to recognise faces is almost entirely down to differences in genes,” she said.

Some aspects of beauty are widely agreed on. For example, most people find symmetrical faces more attractive than wonkier ones. Facial symmetry is thought to reflect good development and to find it attractive might be written in our genes.

But beyond these common, shared preferences, people do tend to have types that they fancy, and which in some cases can be baffling to others.

Germine’s study found that a given person might agree only half the time with others that another person’s face was attractive.

Writing in the journal, Current Biology, the authors explain how the findings fit with the fact that fashion models can make a fortune from their good looks, while friends can endlessly debate who is attractive and who is not.

“From an evolutionary standpoint it might be advantageous, because you learn from your own specific environment which faces to pair with positive information,” Germine said. “The kinds of faces you find attractive would be very specific for you. A good sort for you might not be a good sort for someone in the village down the road.”

Working with colleagues at Wellesley College, Germine looked at 35,000 volunteers’ preferences for different faces, entered through a website. They then looked more closely at the tastes of 547 pairs of identical twins, and 214 pairs of same-sex non-identical twins. Each pair of twins grew up in the same family environment, but identical twins share more of their genes than non-identical twins.

By comparing the preferences of the two groups, the scientists teased out how much genetics and environment contributed to people’s tastes. They found that beauty was very much in the eye of the beholder, and influenced most by their own personal experiences.

“The types of environments that are important are not those that are shared by those who grow up in the same family, but are much more subtle and individual,” Germine said.